The Ancients: Zarathustra

all right good evening ladies and gentlemen thanks for coming out to the inaugural lecture of this year's series this year we're going to do god tiling the ancient so it's sort of the those figures who have been sort of retrospectively we have attached this huge cultural significance to Confucius Lao Tzu Siddhartha Gautama vaasna Plato a couple of other folks and tonight we're going to start with Zarathustra and the founder of Xero astron ISM now what I really want to explore is the continuing influence that these thinkers their ideas their cultural impact has on the world today why it's come about how what's necessary for that to happen and then how it influences our thinking and our experience of the world many thousands of years later sometimes in quite shocking and surprising ways and so a good place to start with this is our through Stroh who sort of in theory the founder of monotheism which we'll talk about but one thing to understand or a couple things a lot to cover here but one is you know we have history and one great definition of history is it's the remembered past right it's the past that we remember but the problem with history is there's a lot of it and most of it happened a long time ago right and so this this sort of makes it tough to remember it but we also have culture I think one way of thinking about culture is it's the history we don't need to remember it's just influencing us whether we know it or not if the impact is there it's profound but we just don't know it generally but we don't need to know it because it's sort of that the water we swim in it's what we do we live in these historical influences whether we know it or not so we don't remember it but when we encounter it it tends to blow our minds oh this is where this concept comes from and this is where these influences occur for Zoroastrianism and the great Persian culture associated with it I'll just give you two examples from from intellectual history one is from Goethe who his entire life was interested in linguistics and language and flawless studied a little bit of Arabic when he was younger some Semitic languages his father said no no no there's no money in that become a lawyer which he did not do thankfully and but later in his life he encounter in his life he encounters a book of poetry from Hafiz the great Persian poet and it absolutely blew his mind that just he called Hafiz the master and the Holy One he said this so began to learn Persian started to renewed his studies of Arabic because he said I want to have direct access to this great language this great idea see these amazing concepts similarly Nietzsche and perhaps his most profound work thus big Zarathustra why does he choose our thewe struck of all the people he could have chosen to speak for in history he said its Zarathustra fault he blames as our theater he says the culture we live in is our thirst rose culture and when he recognizes his mistake because he's the one who made it he'll be the first one to come back and correct it and so this is why he titles the work but both of these incredible thinkers and many others when they encountered this theoretically foreign culture Persian culture and again the Sir Astron isms was closely associated with it across thousands of years you know removed hundreds of thousands of years from direct contact linguistically remote of course and yet they didn't encounter and go this is strange this is weird this is odd this is what you know foreign they went no this is they reckon it resonated with him not because it was strange but because it was familiar because it had the refined elements of what had come down and a much less clear more muddied and watered-down way here it is the language of how these the the ideas of these poets if their dulce and and all of this and it just it just shocked them and many others at the time as soon as i started translating this they were sort of wow this is where it comes from this is the origin this is the beginning and so this is the power of culture they did not know they had been influenced by the incredible power of persian culture until they went back and discovered Hafiz who didn't need discovering rightly he was plenty discovered in his homeland and he just hadn't been discovered in the West what we discovered was the West was not the West the West was sort of an outpost of Persia you know they just we thought it was the West that we were just sort of the frontier land that we just had forgotten we were an outpost of Persia one way to think of Western culture I think is is not horribly incorrectly as a sort of you know --bn itíd offshoot of the great Persian culture and one of the founding elements of that is Zarathustra so when you think of culture think of images all these elements that we don't remember are influencing us we don't know it but they are whether we remember it or not all the stuff comes from someplace from a hundred years ago a thousand years ago in this case three perhaps four millennia have passed since the age of Zarathustra and yet as we'll see the is it the power of his thinking has not gone away if anything has been concentrated in many ways so that's the history versus culture idea and I really want to explore the cultural idea of course through the history second why these few why do these few thinkers have such outsized influence and of course part of this is simply random did you go happenstance of history but you need a couple of things to make this kind of impact one you need to have been part of a civilization that lasted a long time and had a lot of heft influenced a lot of people over a great geographic region and generally over a great deal of time so you you might have had great ideas your culture might have come with great ideas but if you're isolated and no one has access to it no one hears of it then you vanish so we say that Zarathustra and der astron ISM is the original monotheistic religion it's probably really just the first monotheistic religion that was attached to an incredibly world spanning Empire and so it's the one we inherited so one that has come down to a spunk again the power of the Persian culture as we'll see another thing you probably need is literacy oral cultures last a long time and they last in very accurate form so there's no problem with handling handing things down orally until you hit a certain scale if you want your ideas to travel across linguistic boundaries or geographic boundaries or indeed chronological boundaries across time it really really helps to write them down they last so much better that way and it seems obvious but the oral culture was what sustained our civilizations for thousands of years but what tends to come down to us and be remembered as history is that which was written so this is part of what we're really going to be looking at it's not just what's come down to us but how so when we turn to look at zero thooose tourism bizarre Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism one things we have to remember is we no one knows the exact date probably a commented dynasty cyrus the great darius Xerxes all these happy guy they were clearly Zoroastrian if you look at the the carvings that they left which they left all over the all over the Middle Near East and the Persian Empire a Oh relentlessly they say with the blessings of a hora Mosta the god of Zarathustra so when you see that everywhere you know that they are in part or in some Zero Astrium but that doesn't tell you when it began that just tells you when it achieved sort of state recognition so at some time before the Year 600 BC now this is widely debated some people say it's a little bit before with the Medes perhaps 700 BC some people say no no it's a thousand BC with these tribes and what is now northern Iran some say no goes back 2000 BC really hard to know the latest extant Zarathustra in writings come to us from about 1200 ad so that means there's at least an 1,800 to 2,000 year gap between the writings and the origins we have a lot of archaeological evidence of the origins but we don't have a lot of literary evidence until relatively late and so back there in the midst of time how you sort of 600 BC a thousand BC somewhere probably in there until serve gets more archaeological evidence and they'll change it it looks like this person Zarathustra lived and it came up with some truly astounding ideas which I want to touch on but first let me go through the quick history of the Persian Empire here to help you understand how Zarathustra and Zahra Austrian ISM had reach you look at the map here this is the a comenta dynasty around 500 BC so they had Egypt Lybia though coasts of Arabia modern-day Syria all over the Middle Near East up through the Black Sea I mean they were just everywhere it was at the time it was the largest empire the world had ever known and it's still one of the largest empires that have ever exist has existed um truly astounding reach and it lasted well it lasted where we saved 648 to 330 BC so the first version of this lasted for a couple of hundred years centuries and and we know this from the Greeks by the way which we'll talk about you have to be leery when you only learn the history from the enemies of those people right if you only learned about the United States from the North Korean newspapers you would have a very different understanding of who we are and that's sort of what you get in the Greek world you get the the North Korean version of the Persian Empire and then and then they're overthrown famously by Alexander the Great who in Persian history is not really considered that great one of the crimes against humanity was the burning of Persepolis which was sort of the intellectual one of the intellectual capitals of Zoroastrianism that's why we don't have any texts is because Alexander sort of burnt them for us thank you so then Alexander gets booted or the remnants of the Alexandrian program get taken over by the Parthian and they sort of resurrect Zoroastrianism it never really went away I mean there was just this patina of Greek culture over the top of the Zoroastrian substrate and they roll for about four hundred four hundred and fifty years so about 224 AD and then they get run into trouble and shrinks down a bit and then they get taken over by the sassanids and the sasanian empire does a real big sort of push to reintroduce Zoroastrian and they sort of became Zoroastrian fundamentalists and so they did generally historically people could certainly have done great stuff for resurrecting Zoroastrianism but also sort of damaged it by being sort of vicious or a streams which was not at all in keeping with it was sort of like super aggressive Quakers right yeah this it was a it you know being a Quaker we'll kick it out it doesn't work right and so people have a mix or a stirry and scholars have the very mixed feelings about this tisane Ian's because I did some good knitted they did some not so good and then of course the sasanian does dynasty lasts right up until the Islamic wave sweeps through but this is not the end of the ration influence because as many scholars have pointed out Shia Islam was the Islam of most of Iran and made partly because heavily influenced by sour afternoons as in fact is all of the Islamic culture which we'll talk about a little bit so here's the reach so just in that period right I mean this is a huge thousand year twelve hundred year span of time over this huge geographic region so that's one reason it had influence on us is because for over a millennia people who were practicing Zoroastrianism thinking this way recording these thoughts covered much of the known world further this is the Silk Road and so sustain Ian and Parthian traders in particular were spreading out all along the Silk Road and so one of the ways we know about sour astringent is that the Chinese who were trading of course along the Silk Road gave special dispensation to the Zoroastrians to have fire temples in Chinese territory so that the traitors deserve astron traders parsy's could travel along the Silk Road freely this was very rare the Chinese did not do this regularly so it sort of stands out in the Chinese diplomatic history brother the Chinese wrote everything down lovely people right if you want to know history just read the Chinese because they've got it all in a filing cabinet someplace it's amazingly literate culture I mean there's just phenomenal but anyway so so those texts are there and so one way we know about Zoroastrianism is because they had this reach going towards China but also they go the other way to India they had huge influences in Gujarat in the Indus Valley in all of these areas all over the ancient India and and and so if you look at the map of the Silk Road what you can reproduce by slot-1 map was enough and and imagine that this is the chart of the spread of Zoroastrian ideas you'll realize that they just went just Wow all over basically the known world from China to India the Mongolia down and then in the parts that we're more familiar with with Greek history this would be during the a commended period and then during the Roman period lots of influence going that way many many of the Greek philosophers and scholars and scientists that we know went to purchase studied in Persia had dealings with Persia looked to Persia as both the great enemy and the great desired font of learning this is where a lot of this knowledge is coming from while these ideas are flowing out of Persia having huge influence directly in the fact that these people actually went there and indirectly that there was this hundreds of years of competition and trade going on so so famously the one of the sort of arc angels of Zoroastrianism which we'll get to in a moment is Mithra and during the Parthian era the cult of Mithra just took off in rome right and historians like where did this come from whether it's coming fine they realized oh they got it from the Persians this is a Persian idea and the Romans you know we're fighting with a person for trading with the fighting with the Persians trading with the person also they went wow we love this and so all of these Persian ideas all this start to flow into Rome and then of course they come down to us through that way so Persian ideas have come down to us in any number of ways which we'll see all right so that sort of the really quick sketch of a huge massive cultural history thousands of year over a thousand years of central political economic intellectual religious power spread over a vast geographic area and influencing everyone around it from China to India to Rome to Greece and two parts beyond me just Phenom and again you know just the influence as you'll see so why so astron ISM why is there a through straw what makes it unique one Myrna theism if you've ever heard of this concept that there's only one God what you may have heard of I know it sounds silly but people believe it this is this comes to us from Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism AG it is hard for us we're so used to this concept we've been told that this is like the obvious answer right of course there's one God you know all of the good religions have one God then we just fight over who's right all of those religions that have more than one God we know are just silly right this is roughly our cultural cake but where did that idea come from well it comes from Zarathustra it comes from zero astron ISM from the great Persian Empire this has been so profoundly influential it's just mind-boggling but we forget that it's weird this is an incredibly strange and deeply unsatisfactory idea and yet it's had legs for thousands of years before you get monotheism and I always think the first time someone suggested monotheism everybody laughed at them but it caught on but you had you know the historical anthropological history suggests you had a mix of animism and polytheism now animism is a common belief that everything is alive and pervaded with the spirit you trees rocks clouds rivers mountains and so you associate spiritual existence with usually natural phenomenon of particularly large river has a great spirit the Sun has a great spirit a beautiful tree is worthy of worship recognition it's very local physical and palpable but this makes sense right you stand at a mighty river like the Columbia and you just feel something and you go wow that is amazing you also have the version of this and again if you think of all the Greek myths you also get the version of poly polytheism where you have lots of gods and they're really just ill-behaved dangerous humans right and you go ah you know war is sort of this person who goes around creating trouble we know these kinds of people so there's just one of these people they're really big and scary sort of muscley and slightly unbalanced and we worry about them but notice how palpable and understandable that is it's very concrete you can understand it and there's lots of them because the world is crazy and disorganized and there's all these different forces psychological and it that just makes sense now no no theism says no no there is one all-encompassing world-spanning Prime and moving omnipotent God that you cannot conceptualize so great and so mighty and inhuman in every way this this is like a pure abstraction if you remember your first day of sort of algebra when they said here's a symbol and it represents something could be anything and you win what think of this this is this is a leaf of abstraction that is really quite amazing at least to me because a beautiful tree big river got it that there's some crazy gone out there that makes earthquakes happen sure because how else do you explain earthquakes but now that there is one Universal God spanning everything that you can't conceptualize because it's so great and mighty what what am I supposed to do with that this is a central tenet of monotheism and it comes to us from this tradition this is Zarathustra idea but it seems to answer a deep human need to think of the world as organized and as meaningful so on one hand you get this crazy abstraction but you also get this notion that it's meaningful and one of these you get with Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism is a story and the story is as follows this may sound familiar to you the world was made by and habited by this great God Ahura Mazda but there's evil in the world there's there's a contest between good and evil and your decisions matter in the balance of the universe this is the huge difference when you have the Greek guys it doesn't seem to matter what anybody does they just do random stuff beat you up rape you give you gold you're a hero you're dead you know it's like what is going on and you try to appease the gods because they were because you're just like worried all the time they made you nervous by how much you mattered how important you were was just sort of random animism is the same thing you are great and inhabited by spirit so is a tree so as a mountain so is a river so you're just not that titanically important now with Zarathustra argument he says look there's one God he's in a war with evil and you matter your decisions to choose good or evil will be the deciding factor and whether the world turns out well or whether the world turns out poorly this is a distance this is a titanic revolution in how people relate to God and in in Zoroastrianism there's several components of this one your good or Mazda is good essentially you're an aspect of horah Mazda and because Thoreau Mazda is good you're good this is important it has an essentially benevolent and an optimistic outlook on the world people are fundamentally pretty good - you have free choice now this is crazy right this is one of those deep philosophical questions have been going around for a long time does free will exist Zarathustra said knowledge is free will exist but your choices matter it's a crazy like democratic idea the previous gods were there to smite enemies this is what they did right when you look at the gods of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal they're big and dangerous and scary and they'll kill you that's roughly what they were for but now no God is on your side are you going to be on God's side that's the question you get to choose you matter this is a huge promotion for most of the humanity on on earth from being just irrelevant slaves to actually mattering to God this astounding you can see the attraction here from people telling you you don't matter you're probably a slave anyway do you know what what you do really does matter people seem to like this idea along with this is--we're spiritual beings our physical beings are much less important than our spiritual content this is from the central lessons of zero astron ISM this may sound familiar to you by the way right this earthly drab garment that we wear is not what matters there's this eternal immortal element to us many many polytheistic religions and animism as far as I know never thinks this they don't say there's an eternal part of you they say well you die you become one with the great earth you join the mountain no no you stay whole when you die in zero Astron ISM you as an entity is continuous essentially immortal just as attractive by the way this is a great idea I don't want to die I want to continue to be me as much as I might dislike myself and have doubts about myself really I don't want to go away right that that that sort of nagging sense of let's be there forever now we are you don't just fade into the great river you go on ah but the question is how do you go on day of judgment now if you've been good you go to a man with a book who has written down everything you've done this may sound familiar to you and this person by the way written down in a book record-keeping literacy this is not a random image the priests could write they were literate they're not just oral they were taking records and so the obvious analogy is of course somewhere in heaven ahuru mazda has a whole bunch of secretaries we're also taking records and you'll meet them and they'll go who now then you know right this is by the way this this this is where this idea come from I mean everybody knows this right you go to the pearly gates and do DePaul or somebody peter has a book and they've it yes this is not Christian this is your astron and this is our thooose trip this goes all the way back there's actually several versions of this and other versions you go for a narrow or a wide bridge right is it a narrow bridge that you fall off to now if you're good you go to not surprisingly a version of heaven and if you're bad you go to a version of suffering but again zoroastrian an incredibly benevolent religion says that's temporary and at the end times when when our o mazda inevitably wins everyone will be resurrected essentially forgiven and we will all live in paradise forever so this this this narrative of good and bad you're going to be judged you have an immortal soul you will be resurrected you have an afterlife there is one God he has one prophet his name is Zarathustra of course you know that all of these things how much influence of that had on our culture I would say a little teeny tiny bit yeah and just so you know this is by the way this is perfectly clear in the record because you have the Babylonian captivity so the Jews get their temple smash and they get kidnapped vaguely to to Babylon and then when Cyrus the Great saw Astra incursion leader conquers Babylon he says hey we're pretty much free love on the religion thing you want to go back to Jerusalem and build your temple knock yourselves out we'll even give you some money to help you out building it and most of the Jews said have you been to Jerusalem babylons was really nice but some of them the more religiously inclined us at historically accurate most of them to said I know that's that's the best fun well we like it here but but but some of them said no let's go back and build the temple in the pre exile books you have a very Greek like concept of the God by the way there's plural gods as mentioned many times but the the one that jumps out to me is that Jacob wrestled God right Jacob spent in one of the pre exile books I forget which one he wrestles god almighty and then finally God in the morning damages his hip and throws him and says ok now you will be called Israel now the past it really makes no sense in many ways but the whole concept that you could wrestle God you do not wrestle a for a Mazda it makes no sense to wrestle a monotheistic God unless this are really sad most yes to God right it's like we have sort of this week but that's no you you know all of the Greek heroes were constantly fighting Gilgamesh kills a god tilde mesh fight with a bunch of them that's the old polytheistic concrete God we could we can understand a God that we can fight but wins every time stronger than us but not that much stronger than us ahora Mazda no no he's the universe you just you don't know hi oh hey just makes no it well where would you grab him you know it's not so when you get the post exile books of the Old Testament and of course into the news Testament it's a whole new God all of a sudden it's not gods of the tried the Israel very small very local other gods around it's the God and he is world spanning it's new you don't read the Old Testament it just changes dramatically in the post exile books because they had encountered so after him they went wow that's a much better God we're gonna go with Oh God we're gonna change the name of course can't spell it so we're gonna go with y'all way it's much easier to spell ah you know you know so that that that transition is perfectly clear isn't the archaeological and the literary record of the times and so that this influence comes directly there but then it also comes to us through the Greeks right you know many people have noticed that the New Testament reads a lot like Plato right it's sort of if you take Old Testament and introduce it to Plato what you get is the many elements of the New Testament but many of those elements come from zero Astron ISM this is this this notion of eternal perfect forms this is a hora Mazda soso monotheism I mean we could just go on and on about that but so that concept is really strong good and evil this is one of the great things about reading old texts many many of them have no what we would consider clear moral conception at all and we're always like well what what is the lesson here cuz who's good and who's he and what was that what what are the more see that cause it that's because that concept wasn't there I don't have a concept they have strong and weak perhaps just and unjust preferable and unprofitable they knew this this isn't very good and that's much better but the notion that there is this spanning sense of good and evil just did not extend but by the way this is why I need you entitled his book Beyond Good and Evil let's get the hell beyond that we used to not be there then we got it we got it from this so if you've ever in your life thought wow the world is her divided between good and evil how influential is that thought but by the way it's a very very lazy cultural thought tool it really is it's not a is it all the philosophical reflection not just need you but many of this you just as you think about a little bit you realize that dividing the world into good and evil just isn't that helpful and some it does oversimplify things a touch right and so there are problems with this but nonetheless that power is there that that sense that desire that we have to just tell me what is the good people and the bad people what's the good thing to do and any time we can't work that out we're just like oh I feel so stressed I don't want to think about it I don't know what's good and bad I just I get confused this this is where this is coming from the notion that we are spiritual beings we love this idea there's more to us than just this physical materialist incarnation there must be we have this sense very strongly now that was not invented by zero Astron ism but it was mated to this monotheistic world spanning God so now we're not just by the way spiritual like a tree or a rock we're spiritual innocence that we're part of God the linguistic evidence suggests strongly that the zero Astron probably borrowed this from the vedic hindus right from the early vedic texts that some of the language is very similar so we dislike yeah that looks like they probably incorporated that but it is this powerful concept I am NOT just spiritual I'm especially spiritual I'm a piece of God incarnate in the world of course the notion of God made flesh is a silly one no one would go for that right yeah so yeah so that's the hair so that one is very popular it has been with us for a long time and of course because of that we matter and that's the one we like a lot we really really do matter we're more important than trees in mountains and rivers those are important and valuable and good but we're special we're above the natural world and one of the recurrent themes in it that you'll get from Zoroastrian texts by the way it's it's the it's the Vedas are the gothis investor godless or the key text the investor is the big sacred book which is like many sacred books an incredible mess because it's been accumulated from pieces over centuries from left over but the core of them at the goss's which seem to be the texts that are directly attributable to Zarathustra at a 2000 year removed right so it's it's tricky but one of the things that comes over and over and over again is the world is good and is here for us to cultivate right we are part of the natural world that we have dominion over it the waters are for irrigation the land is for tilling the animals are for domestication this is a central 10 the world is good and it's here for us but it also puts its obligation to treat it well which we'll talk about a bit um so part of this is so life is good in fact life is supposed to be good again Zarathustra ISM sure a stream has this very strong impulse towards life is good it's an upbeat optimistic religionist you read through it there are problems there's evil in the world we'll talk about our Amon the spirit of evil but mostly life is good and if we're good life is better and the better we are the better life becomes and that's what ahora mazda wants you know you're living well because your life is good because that's what ahora Moz did want so the better your life is the better you feel the better your community is doing the more you know you're living within the will of ahora Mazda the less good the less pleasant the less beneficent well you've gone wrong someplace and so that makes ahora Mazda kind of upset but he doesn't smite people he just kind of goes aw it's too bad right do better and then of course the whole idea of this continuous afterlife now there's some debate about whether there's any reincarnation it looks like the originally there was not that you just died and you went and hung out either in paradise or in suffering waiting for the final resurrection and that was a big break with the animist polytheistic tradition in which you generally just died and went away or the Hindu tradition even the later to Hindu tradition which is this continual endless cycle or if not endless sort of very very long cycle because it meant you stay whole as youth and they were very big on the continuity of the human being so these the central tenets are what came down to us now the problem though as I mentioned with monotheism and a lot of this is so what am I supposed to identify with how do i express myself to an abstract world-spanning all-knowing all-seeing force of energy it's like saying who's your God well dark matter what do you know about it not much where is it everywhere can you detect it probably not see not helpful we don't like that even physicists don't like it and theoretically they don't worship of their sister but drives them crazy right there they didn't really want to know more and so immediately what you get is these I gave you this list so you have our Mazda here it's on the front is the prime mover uncreated single God opposed by the force of our Amon now the notion of Ahriman is like a satan with a pitchfork and a tail and all that think very much more like gravity he's just this element that got introduced into the universe that is everywhere it's not really most of the time seem to be referred to as a like conscious being that you know Faust might call up and and make it packed with much more just like a continuous sort of pressure or presence or possibility I said sort of a gravitational force but so they have Archangels and this is where people tended to identify they didn't worship them but they were manifestations of uh who are Mazda that you could kind of get your hands on intellectually emotionally so you had there's a bunch of them by their this is not like these are just some of the big ones and no one agrees by the way on who all of the main ones are so you know again but you have lo who mano which is the good mind is the translation of that but he presides over cattle you'll notice there's a very strong agricultural theme that will develop here Asha vashisht uh hi zoster presiding over fire now fire is the symbol of a hora Mazda perfect light is it again it's this abstraction the fire is the concrete representation of the all-pervading force and light that is a [ __ ] Mazda the sir a stream does not worship fire they aren't worship fire worshippers they but the fire is the symbol of what ahora Maz is the light of the universe if you will right they may be familiar with this language again by the way I'm sorry about these names which I'm killing Hofstra Vyra literally desirable Dominion presiding over metals and these are specifically the metals that you mine right so there's a sacred spirit that presides over mining whereas a very concrete good thing cattle fire mining it's not abstract right and you know go spent literally holy devotion presiding over the earth and this is the earth and the sense of cultivated Earth there's a great passage in the Avesta where an early sort of one of the early founders of the saurashtra normas it comes to and says you know settle and prosper and multiply and he does in any and then we get a lot of people a lot of cattle and they say we're out of land and and the Archangel comes down and says here's more land six-fold increase in land and so they fill that and the Archangel comes down again six-fold increase in land more fresh water more pasture for your cattle more air and this happens over and over a bit religiously actually and until the earth is your dominion is really this is that the endless increase and it seems like a sort of crazy idea because we think of nature being limited but if you look at the size of the a commanded dynasty here it does have this sort of endless capacity to it it truly truly is vast and because they were continually making agricultural progress very scientifically advanced in many of their techniques for irrigation for instance they were multiplying they really were expanding dramatically it worked well at least it worked for twelve hundred years yeah Vata perfection of health presides over water so all of these key angels are concrete and you see this in the Catholic Church right all-knowing all-seeing all-powerful God wonderful Mary that we understand Saints let's get some Saints on the scene because what do you do with this abstraction right it's really tough to get your hands on in in in the process and tradition you'll be had this problem for years in the Catholic tradition is Jesus God well yes and now how many gods do you have one or two or three right and and but it's understandable because again it's just we want a God made flesh we want something we can grab on to something we can see something we can relate to God as man we can relate to that suffering we've got that just total abstraction no we don't and so people say well a zero Astraea nism polytheistic a monotheistic we have one God but it has lots of aspects that you can relate to this is again a very popular concept continues to this day so when people say have a personal relationship with God this is what they mean this goes all the way back this is nothing new this is not developed in the last thousand years so several thousand years old and traceable at least back to those are a streams and so the core moral imperatives of Zoroastrianism or benevolence uprightness cleanliness cultivation of the earth and moderation it's an interesting list they really really mean benevolence they they believed in being good I mean this is this is central tenet is if you're good God blesses you if you're not he doesn't be good that's why the phrase you'll often hear is with with zero astron ISM which is their motto essentially is think good thoughts speak good words do good deeds and occasionally you'll see this translated as good thoughts good words good deeds I would argue it's important to keep the think speak and do in there it's a very active religion it is not recovered you do not conquer most of the known world in quiet contemplation you do you speak you think it's not it's an imperative you must act if you aren't do literally physically doing good you're failing you can't Jesse it's sort of roughly the opposite of retiring from the world you have to be in the world doing good works or you're not good I had this so part of the problem we have with the Persian Empire again associated with this is weakening for the Greeks and they said oh these they're these faced civil rights who sit in silk curtain lounges with all these women and and fruit and they're just not very manly and they're sort of you know hopeless and so us the mighty man like Greeks will conquer them which they didn't of course but you don't conquer again all of this territory and control it for hundreds made thousands of years by just hanging out eating fruit in in sort of nice gardens with the active imperative is there in the Persian culture go do be think say yeah you have to be active if you're not you're not good it's a very strong fight you guys people always accuse in the ancient world the Athenians of being like this but a lot of this is the Persians and so I thought this is there's an actual quote from the investor here now I will proclaim to those who will hear the things that understanding man should remember for hims unto a horror and praise to good thoughts also the felicity of that is with the heavenly lights which through right shall be held by him who wisely thinks right for hims unto a hora and prayers to good thoughts that's what we want this is repeated roughly 10,000 times in the Avesta it's it's really a tough read I will say this it it is an amalgam textures amazing passages in there and then there's lots of praise of who a Mazda and and but that is really the core of it think good thoughts and praise a hora Mazda and everything would be fine I'm not gonna read all of this but I thought it would be nice if you had just some selections here this is from the Gaza this is from the part that is associated most closely with Zarathustra himself here with your ears the best things look upon them with clear sing thought for decision between two beliefs each man for himself before the great consummation be thinking you that it be accomplished to our pleasure here with you here the best things look upon them with clear sing thought for decision between two beliefs this is between good and evil each man for himself before the great consummation as far as I can tell now this is maybe record but this is perhaps the earliest invocation that every individual is called to speak and think for themselves that in that moral imperative that you are responsible for you comes from Zarathustra from the Zoroastrian Persian tradition and and we think I you hear this all time Oh America freedom right land of the individualism oh here we go you know this is this new thing on the planet that people should be responsible for ourself and make your own decisions and reflect on your own world guidance and yeah America we've been here for 12 minutes and it's all us except for this Persian bit it's all ass except where we got it from the Persians right this this very strong individualistic line comes powerfully you can't miss it if you read a bunch of ancient texts and then you read the Zoroastrian texts it's it just it just pours off the page at you because there is this and do good deeds it's not Gilgamesh do good not the king not the priests not the hero but if you read the Greek Greek classics again it's a lot of important noble people doing things and a lot of everybody else being crushed and nobody seems to notice the ship sank and poor Ulysses almost drowned well what about all those other poor suckers right they get like all that was sad I miss my friends but poor Ulysses poor Odysseus out there on the waves right we really focus on the Jim great story man I love the story but you just realize that they just throw the other characters overboard all I mean just they just die left or right nobody seems to notice they don't matter basically they only matter in the context of the noble people who are associated with God and the God their heroes do my god chosen by the God in the Zoroastrian tradition we're all chosen by God we're all the dishes were all Achilles we're all Gilgamesh right we've got the Spirit of God in us but that comes with this incredible responsibility now you're going to be judged so what the hell you going to do this is this is this is not the religion of slavery the person's had slaves but is this very strong leaning towards actual people begin to matter and this is again newish now the Egyptians had polytheism they had an afterlife and they had judgment but boy hard to get any sense that people mattered at all and Pharaohs mattered some of the priests mattered but everybody else just seems so much chaff so this is new and by the way this may be inevitable you get larger civilizations you get larger cities you get more diversification of trades you get more literate people and all of a sudden people really do start to matter you know it's much easier to be this sort of autocratic all-powerful all-knowing all-seeing King when you don't need metal workers you know when you go home make those guys go and they're like well you know we better between them nice because they know how to make metal and we really don't understand how to do that oh okay we're sorry we like you here have the money right I mean it's this sort of that the balance of power is starting to slowly shift as you get this diversification and so all of these forms have come down to us and we'd like I said we've we've just forgotten and now the two primal spirits who reveal themselves and visions as twins are the better and the bad in thought and word in action and between these two the wise ones choose a right the foolish not so choose the right and be wise choose the wrong and be a fool not surprisingly lying was one of the core bags speak good speak well speak true even the Greeks had to give to the Persians the fact that they were really big on keeping their oohs and telling the truth to the point of almost obsession they just really believed in this you did what you said you were going to do you meant what you said and you spoke true this is by the way this is who Mithra was Mithra was the goddamn mayor or the archangel who made sure this happened he was the keeper of Earth's and if you broke your oath you had Mithra to answer to so so these sorts of imperatives are upon us and if you go all the way towards the end of this patch like I said on you we can't read at all but just give you a taste of the Avesta if oh you mortals you mark the commandments which Mazda hath ordained of happiness and pain the long punishments for the father of the druze which is sort of the evil ways or the evil ones and blessings for the followers of rightness then hereafter shall it be well do good and you will be well do evil and you will suffer but you'll suffer now this is another aspect of this four who are Mazda all of them you want to have a pleasant afterlife but much of the goodness comes to you now there's no evidence that they thought suffering now for something good later was a good idea they thought suffering now meant you were doing something wrong because life is good over a Mazda want you to have a pleasant life so if your life isn't Pleasant you've gone wrong we struggle with this concept we like the idea so then we also have the tradition that says no no no you're supposed to suffer and struggle and life is a drag and then good things happen later we have both which makes us confused but for the zoroastrian is our thirst Hrant tradition is is much clearer life is good enjoy it if you're enjoying your life then you're doing the right thing if you're not you're probably not doing the right thing which means it has a kind of a good way of working things out so 700 rolls around ish and Islam overwhelms their astronauts and many of the texts had already been lost the sasanian dynasty was helpful and unhelpful and essentially the Persian concept falls from our minds from our histories we forget where all of this comes from right this is great interregnum we lose access to the language well we literally stopped trading for a while the Silk Road is broken up the the what would what is to become Europe turns inward looking the Mediterranean becomes essentially a closed sea for a while trade overland becomes incredibly difficult we don't have the the scholars or the linguistic knowledge to maintain contact or even understand what's coming to us for hundreds of years but one way to think of the dark ages is we forgot Persian however the dark ages all nobody speaks Persian of course our times are dark your life is bad when you don't know Persian you lose your poetry all the beautiful art history the architecture the nice gardens that's the dark ages and then like I said slowly with the development of fillol OG as we move into the 15th 16th 17th century when trade starts to open up again and we start to look out our first thought is wow aren't we great and aren't those backwards people a bunch of savages which seems good um but then we went oh wait a second hold on Nietzsche Goethe they started reading they started seeing they started listening anyway oh this is us this is a unbelievably powerful focused a mixed version of some of our better nature come to us again like an echo hearing it and that's the incredible power of culture we don't know this we don't remember it but we swim in the sea of this civilization that we thought had died you know thirteen hundred years ago but it didn't die it influenced us today continues to influence the world won by the way there are still Zoroastrianism Zoroaster parsees in around Bombay and India although it probably better to call them Parsi ISM now because it's sort of of course they've been in India for a long time and Hinduism sort of absorbs everything that comes in contact with this amazingly powerful ability to do that but they're still they're more important I think is the strong influence of which we've talked about by said you know if you look at Iran today the homeland of the Persians they still speak a version of Persian by the way Farsi is that four in Afghanistan parts of Pakistan is tens hundreds of millions of people still used a living language it's not a dead language it's been a continuously spoken not by us so we figure it doesn't matter no one speaks it of course just by literate people with good poetry you know that and and and it's still there continuously the archaeological research is going on and the influences I said is incredibly powerful particularly in the Shia version of Islam a lot of the notions of doing good works of benevolence of charity that are associated with contemporary Islam are strongly drawn from the encounter with these Persian civilizations and of course this extends into China because you have the whole Persian influence in China and extends into India I mean it's just it's just all over the place but if you've ever wondered to yourself you said wow where did monotheism come from what a crazy idea see we don't wonder that kind of stuff doing it's weird you just think well that must be it those polytheistic people are strange and we're normal that's because we've forgotten that we live in this heritage and the heritage it's just shapes our thinking to a phenomenal - grief and so one thing I would encourage strongly everyone is to remember you know Zarathustra and the incredible influence of Persian civilizations like I said we are sort of this muddied inheritance of the greatness of the Persian world so thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 38,082

Rating: 4.8755302 out of 5

Keywords: Humane Arts, Zarathsutra, Persia, Philosophy, Monotheism, Wes Cecil, History

Id: LWwf4wdBmpg

Length: 62min 10sec (3730 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2017